PROCESS - 7. Need analysis, design and facilitate: do you manage all the processes?

Large corporations have specific offices for everything. Thus, what happens frequently is that the right hand doesn’t know what the left one is doing. When you want to start understanding the cultural, learning, and development needs of a company, usually you conduct a need analysis. That can for instance be done through a survey, an assessment, or one-on-one meetings with the different business leaders. What you need to keep in mind is that during your analysis, you will need to consider the goal you were hired to achieve, as well as culture, and time and cost constraints.

After the need analysis you start to formulate the right answers to different needs. If you work in your own country, it will be relatively easy to share the relevant information with different vendors who can facilitate your desired solution and select the right ones – the ones that understand your culture, give you the right advice, and design exactly the solution you need, while taking into account all the conditions you shared with them. What does this tell us? It means that experts in different countries need to know:

• vendors/solution providers in their own country and their respective competencies (leadership, development, culture, personal skills, …)
• The L&D budget available to them, and they should be able to manage the entire population and their different needs. The budget is not divided equally across countries, instead you should know which area needs more ‘growth support’ than others in that specific year. It’s like when you have multiple children, you don’t give them an equal amount of chocolate each either – it depends on whether they like it, need it, deserve it, …
• understand who the right person is to deliver the final ‘growth message’ in order to achieve the desired results

That last aspect is a very important one, because

• If you feel like your external solution provider would be a good choice, then you should understand which of their members is the right person to deliver the facilitation, training, and coaching.
• If you think that someone from the people office team would be right, then she/he should be able to deliver the correct message (the upcoming article no.8 will be useful for that).
• If you feel like a colleague from within the business should do it, then maybe the external provider can support you in preparing the business for the growth message.

This means that the different parts of the L&D process shouldn’t all be done by the same person. Instead, the person governing the L&D process should decide who would be the best choice to deliver each message, taking into account the respective needs and constraints in each situation. If you are coordinating different countries, it might be that different parts of the process are facilitated by experts from within the respective countries. Therefore, be open and understand their specific knowledge!??